


Getting Into Knives

by alouette_des_champs



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Cheating, Depression, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Infidelity, Internalized Homophobia, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Suicide Attempt, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:07:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28441389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alouette_des_champs/pseuds/alouette_des_champs
Summary: After a failed suicide attempt, Azula is forced to confront all the burned bridges, broken relationships, and bad memories she left back in her hometown.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Azula/Mai (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar), Mai/Zuko (Avatar), Suki/Ty Lee (Avatar)
Comments: 35
Kudos: 102





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **CW/TW: SUICIDE ATTEMPT, CONTINUED SUIDICAL IDEATION, CHILDHOOD SEXUAL AND PHYSICAL ABUSE**
> 
> Or: I remembered ATLA as my childhood unproblematic fav, but then I watched it all the way through as an adult and had to work through Some Shit. 
> 
> The first chapter is a lot of interiority and scene-setting, but I promise the second chapter gets into the action. Rating subject to change.
> 
> Title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d16edFmAHbk

Azula had been valedictorian, a model UN ambassador, captain of both the debate team and the volleyball team. Her Ivy League degree had a string of impressive Latin words tacked onto the end. She was working at her father’s Fortune 500 company, drowning in offers from the nation’s best law schools. At the moment, she also happened to be standing in the lobby of a hospital in too-big yellow grippy socks, clutching a paper bag full of everything she’d had on her when she’d been admitted. Classic little black dress, tasteful gold chain, heirloom ring, Ferragamo clutch…not a bad outfit to die in. The only thing that was missing was the shoes. She hadn’t been wearing them when the EMTs had hauled her out of the hotel. Who _knew_ what fate had befallen her favorite black pumps.

Just for the record, Azula had _not_ tried to kill herself.

The drinks at the company mixer she had attended that night had been stronger than she’d realized. She had accidentally taken one too many pills; she’d misunderstood the instructions on the bottle. It was an easy mistake. She probably would have been fine if that nosy fucking maid hadn’t called 911.

Besides, it wasn’t like this type of indiscretion was unheard of in the corporate world. Everyone who was anyone had a drug problem. They would overdose, take a short vacation to a resort posing as a rehab facility, come back well-rested, and resume the status quo, only to repeat it all over again the next year. Why _she’d_ had to waste over a month of her life in a psych hospital, of all places, was beyond her.

A nurse in patterned scrubs was standing beside her, popping her gum and scrolling on social media. Making sure she didn’t run off without an escort. It was hospital policy: nobody got out of the psych ward without someone there to pick them up. Azula’s protests and threats of legal action had fallen on deaf ears. She had called her father several times, but he’d sent her to voicemail just as many. Uncle Iroh was the only other person who picked up the phone for her anymore.

After what felt like an hour, he pulled up to the curb in his beat-up VW beetle, smiling and waving as if he were there to pick her up from summer camp. Azula made an immediate beeline for the door before the nurse could say a word, tromping determinedly over icy concrete in her fucking socks. She wrenched the car door open, glaring daggers at the parking lot looky-loos as she climbed into the passenger’s seat.

“It’s good to see you!” Uncle Iroh exclaimed cheerfully. “How are you feeling?”

“How do you _think_ I’m feeling?” Azula bit off each word with the crisp harshness she had learned from her father, a tone that silenced boardrooms and sent CEOs scrambling like interns. Uncle Iroh, however, appeared completely unfazed.

“Probably pretty tired.” 

Azula _was_ tired. The medication they had forced on her put her in a constant state of headachy grogginess. She had absolutely no intention of picking up the prescriptions the psychiatrist had written for her. Uncle Iroh certainly wouldn’t bother her about it; he was a staunch believer in traditional medicine. He had probably already mixed up an anti-suicidal ideation tea blend for her. Not that she was suicidal, of course. 

He glanced at her as if to confirm his suspicions, his smile softening into something like sympathy. She fucking hated it. 

“You can take a nap on the car ride home.”

“What are you talking about?” Azula scoffed. “My apartment is ten minutes away, tops.”

The smile faded from Uncle Iroh’s face, replaced with an expression of weary sadness. Her stomach dropped. “Have you spoken to your father?”

“No.”

“He called when you first went into the hospital. He mentioned that he was going to stop paying the rent on your apartment. I believe he also gave your job to someone else in the company. I’m sorry, Azula. I assumed he had told you himself.”

Azula tightened her jaw, looked straight ahead. She couldn’t even be angry. It was just business. She’d stopped fulfilling her end of the bargain, so he’d stopped fulfilling his.

*

After a brief stop at the storage unit into which her father had haphazardly tossed all her worldly possessions, they made the hour and a half drive back to the suburbs where Azula had grown up. She watched the neat urban architecture dissolve into housing developments dissolve into fields. Finally, the fields reshaped themselves into yet another wave of housing developments, clustered around a mid-sized town. 

Uncle Iroh owned a teahouse on the quaint little mock-up of a turn of the century main street. His apartment above the shop was almost unbearably cozy. The meager space was filled with thriving houseplants, mementos from Iroh’s travels, and family photos. Well, photos of Zuko and the late Lu Ten, really. Azula’s only appearance was as an ugly little raisin of an infant being held by a two-year-old Zuko on the day she was born. Their mother’s hand was visible at the very edge of the shot, hovering to make sure he didn’t drop her. Looking at it made her feel sad and angry and strangely hysterical. What a darling start to a life that had turned out like hers had.

Azula parked her single suitcase in one corner of the spare bedroom, threw herself down on the too-soft mattress on its ancient metal frame, and stayed there for a week.

*

From the hours of 9 AM to 6 PM, she was a captive audience to the sounds of the Jasmine Dragon below her: machines running, cups clinking, the bell that rang when the door opened, and worst of all, Uncle Iroh’s loud, incessant chatter. God, did he ever shut up? Azula tried sandwiching her head between two pillows to muffle the noise, but she could still hear his voice. His deep belly-laugh followed her into queasy, anxious sleep that never lasted long enough for her to feel rested. She let herself cry like she hadn’t cried since early childhood. Why not? Her life was over. There was no image left to protect.

In her more lucid moments, Azula wondered bitterly if this was the same room where Zuko had lived out his years in purgatory. He had been fourteen when Dad had stopped paying his private school tuition, kicked him out of the house, and effectively cut him out of their family. She had only been twelve at the time, but she remembered thinking that it was probably in Zuko’s best interest to leave no matter how hard he fought to stay. If he’d hung around for any longer, dad might have killed him. The scar on his face proved that their father was capable of anything; she’d always quite admired that quality in him. Azula had held on to the family name for a good decade longer, but she’d still met the same fate. Maybe living up to Ozai’s expectations had always been an impossible task. Maybe she just hadn’t been good enough.

Uncle Iroh brought her a cup of tea and a bowl of his home cooking three times a day. Sometimes Azula nibbled at the offering, but most of the time, she just let it grow cold beside her. She hadn’t been hungry in what felt like years. When she heard her uncle coming, she turned her back to the door so she wouldn’t have to interact with him. He usually set the dishes on the nightstand and left quietly, but one day near the middle of her self-isolation, she felt the mattress dip as he sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed.

“Your brother is like a second son to me,” Iroh said quietly, solemnly. “I always hoped to have the same relationship with you, but you never seemed to want that. That’s alright. I will respect your choice. But I just want you to know that if you ever change your mind, I will be here.”

She did not roll over. She held her tongue. Eventually, he sighed, stood up, and left.

The last thing in the world she wanted was another father.

Azula would never tell her uncle or anyone else how it had felt to be her father’s favorite child. She had been groomed for greatness, and a couple other things, besides. Dad had never hit her, never raised his voice at her, never denied her anything she wanted, but, well… nothing in life comes for free. That had been the first of his many lessons. She’d started making installment payments on his unconditional love long before Zuko had been old enough to butt heads with him.

Azula had been on her own then. Her mother had either been complicit or oblivious before she’d walked out entirely. Zuko had been too young and self-absorbed to notice the suspicious amount of time their father spent in his bratty little sister’s bedroom. Her uncle had been busy with his own life. She had been forced to adapt to survive the war that had been invisible to everyone else. A split second of indecision or an expression of pain or fear could have disastrous consequences; she’d had to keep a firm hold on herself twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And after all that misery, after all she’d done to ensure a life for herself, Azula was still very much on her own; this time, though, she had nothing to barter with, nothing anyone wanted.

Nobody ever had to know about any of that, but surely everyone in town knew by now that she had spent time in a mental hospital. Azula couldn’t bring herself to step into the harsh winter light of her new, more public shame. Maybe she should try again, not half-ass it this time. Leave nothing to chance. A clean shot to the head was a good bet based on the research she’d done. Dad had cancelled all of her credit cards, but he couldn’t touch her checking account; she had more than enough to buy a handgun.

The only thing that stopped her was the thought of the legacy she would leave behind. Azula could handle people thinking she was a spoiled, Machiavellian monster, but she couldn’t stomach the idea of people pitying her. She wouldn’t let them attribute her any weakness, not even post-mortem. She was just going to have to climb the ladder all over again. 

On the day she finally climbed out of bed for good, Azula allowed herself to look in the mirror for the first time in two months. It was catastrophic, worse than she’d thought. Her hair, normally sleek and shiny, was a greasy, ratted mess. Her face was the color of dishwater, breaking out around her mouth and nose, eyes all but swallowed up in blue bags. She normally kept her body at an attractive level of feminine fitness: not muscular enough to be course, but not waifish enough to appear vulnerable. Now, fat had redistributed itself to all the places she did not want it and her bones were poking through in all the places they shouldn’t. If Azula was going to step back out into the world, she would need a haircut, a proper skincare routine, a manicure, possibly a juice cleanse, a gym membership, and the more allies the better.

She used her uncle’s landline instead of her own phone to make the call. Everyone she’d grown up with probably had her number blocked. It was a dirty trick, but when had Azula ever played a clean game? She summoned all her spitfire and dialed the number she had for Mai. She fully expected a stranger to pick up—the number had been current, what, five years ago?—but there was no mistaking Mai’s sultry apathy on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

“Where do people in this hellhole get a manicure?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Azula reconnects with her high school squad; nothing goes the way she wants it to.

On average, a manicure took around thirty to forty-five minute from start to finish, but Azula felt certain that she and Mai had been sitting side by side in total silence for at least ten hours.

Occasionally, she let her eyes dart sideways, taking in small snapshots of her companion. Mai hadn’t _changed_ so much as she had just grown up. Her hair was shorter, falling to a practical length just past her shoulders, but she had kept the same straight, blunt bangs she’d always worn. She was still dressed in all black everything, but instead of a Hot Topic dress and fishnet tights it was a classy sweater, jeans, and ankle boots. She looked thinner than Azula remembered; wasn’t having a baby supposed to make you fat? The diamond on her ring finger glimmered in the harsh fluorescent light of the rinky-dink nail salon.

The last time they had spoken, Mai had invited Azula to her wedding, to which Azula had RSVPed a definitive, verbose, and profanity-laden “no.”

Azula knew that it had been unfair of her to take out her anger on the bride when it had been meant for the groom. She and Zuko had never gotten along, not even when they’d been children. She had _hated_ the idea of the two of them getting married, joining together in what she’d imagined as a blissful union against her.

Okay, maybe she had been a _little_ paranoid at the time. It had been the summer between her junior and senior years of college, and Dad had gotten her an incredibly stressful internship at a law firm. Her liberal use of stimulants had left her feeling…high-strung. At the time, it had been been worth it; she’d outdone herself on every job she was assigned, dazzled the senior attorneys, put all the other interns to shame. What a waste. There was no way she was ever collecting on that letter of recommendation now.

There was nothing for Azula to do but wait for Mai to process through what must have been a formidable backlog of resentment and watch the tech do a mediocre job on her nails. She kept her manicure natural, short, and rounded, her one and only potential tell. There was no such thing as “out and proud” in the company culture her father had built. Azula always took care to dress and groom herself at the precise intersection of girl-boss and boss-girl—not too masculine, not too feminine. Mai, on the other hand, had opted for a medium-length stiletto, a somewhat sexier choice than Azula had expected from her ex-best friend. She was busy musing on what this might mean when Mai finally spoke up.

“This is where we went to get our nails done for prom.” It was hard to tell whether she despised this memory or looked back on it fondly.

“I remember. Yours were black.” Azula glanced down at the bottle of black polish Mai had chosen; Mai tipped her head at the bottle of blood-red polish beside it.

“And yours were red.” She rolled her eyes. “Ty Lee always got those godawful rhinestones.”

Azula seized on this semi-neutral topic of conversation.

“What’s Ty Lee up to these days?” 

“She teaches some classes at the dojo with Suki. I think she’s in some sort of dance group with that theater downtown, too…I don’t know…I kind of zone out when she talks about it.”

“Who’s Suki, again?”

“You know Suki. She went to public school with Zuko. Jock girl. She used to date Sokka, that loud guy who thought he was really funny.”

“Right, right.” She still had no idea who they were talking about, but it wasn’t worth pressing the issue. Zuko had made a whole host of annoying new friends when he’d transferred schools, none of whom Azula cared about nor remembered. Another reason she hadn’t wanted to go to his wedding; the company would have been abysmal.

There was another long moment of silence. The nail techs exchanged a nervous glance.

“How’s my niece?” Azula asked in what she hoped was a pleasant tone of voice.

Mai snorted derisively. “Wow. Only took a full year for you to acknowledge my daughter’s existence.”

 _Some of us were busy graduating from college,_ Azula thought, but she stopped short before she said it. Cutting people to pieces like that didn’t give her the perverse pleasure it once had. It was more like a reflex. She was living in a glass house now, so it was best not to immediately start firing stray shots.

“Touchy subject. Alright. How’s my brother, then?”

“Like that’s _not_ a touchy subject.” Mai breathed out sharply through her nose, finally fed up. “Why did you call me, Azula?”

“I just wanted to catch up with an old friend. Is there something wrong with that?”

“Zuko told me what happened.”

Azula bristled. She should have known that Uncle Iroh wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut. He probably thought he was doing her a favor, softening her brother up so that Zuko would go easy on her when they inevitably saw one another again. She met the other woman’s impenetrable gaze, trying to keep her own expression as neutral as possible.

“He has no idea what happened.”

It was meant to sound like a threat, but it came out sounding more like a plea. Mai didn’t even blink.

“Set me straight, then.”

“It was an accident.”

“Pretty big accident.”

“They happen to the best of us.”

Mai shrugged, finally breaking eye contact. “If you say so.”

“All done!” exclaimed one of the nail techs with an almost desperate enthusiasm, already halfway out of her chair. “Let’s get you ladies checked out!”

*

By the time Azula made it back to the apartment, she was exhausted. So much for her tightly scheduled fourteen-hour work days—now she could barely run an errand without feeling like she’d done a triathlon. She curled up on the couch under a brightly colored afghan and stared at the dimming beam of daylight reflected on the wall. It took a while for her to name the ache that was settling in behind her breastbone: loneliness.

As fucked up as it felt to admit, she actually missed her father. Working with Dad had guaranteed at least five irate phone calls a day. It had never been a pleasant conversation, but at least it was a conversation. Someone to talk to, someone familiar. It had been just the two of them for so many years. He’d been the only one there on her birthdays, at the hospital when she’d had her appendix removed, in the bleachers watching her play volleyball…she was terrified of him, but she loved him, too. There had been no-one else to love.

Maybe that was why she didn’t feel quite as irritated as usual when Uncle Iroh came up from the shop and poked his head into the living room. She was still mad at him for opening his big mouth to Zuko, of course, but she didn’t have the energy to confront him about it right then.

“Go anywhere fun this afternoon?” His casual phrasing didn’t fool her; he wanted to know where she had been, with who, doing what. It was none of his goddamn business, but she thrust out a hand to display her nails anyway.

“That’s a good color on you,” he said appreciatively. She rolled her eyes.

“I could use some help with dinner.”

“Maybe you should call Meals on Wheels.”

He laughed, turning to make his way into the kitchen.

“Fine, fine,” he called over his shoulder in mock-anguish. “Leave your old uncle to labor over a hot stove all alone.”

Azula drifted in and out, floating in the homey smell of cooking and the warmth of her little cocoon. She found herself thinking about prom. Azula remembered very little of the dance itself, but she remembered sitting in the back seat of Zuko’s hand-me-down SUV on the way there. Some reprehensible early-2000s pop punk was blaring through the tinny speaker. Mai was riding shotgun, her hand reaching over the center console to rest on Zuko’s thigh. If Azula was a junior and Mai was a senior, that meant that Zuko had already been out of high school for a full year. _Loser._

Azula and Ty Lee were in the back seat, passing a flask back and forth, psyching themselves up to be just-best-friends for the night. Their private all-girls’ academy was fairly secular, but it was still a Catholic school. There were rules. She remembered how the stiff, beaded bodice of Ty Lee’s dress had felt under her hands, the tulle skirt itchy where it was smashed against Azula’s bare leg. She remembered kissing her before they went in and then wiping the extra lipstick away from the corner of her mouth with her thumb, already feeling jealous and hurt and angry because she _knew_ that boys were going to ask Ty Lee to dance and she _knew_ that her girlfriend would say yes and she _knew_ that there was nothing she could do but find her own boys to dance with. The teenage self-loathing bubbled up from inside the memory and spilled over, just as potent as it had been back then.

Azula knew that Ty Lee wasn’t capable of holding a grudge the way that Mai could. If there was anyone in the world capable of making her feel like herself again, it would be Ty Lee. Of course, you couldn’t just sashay back into your high school ex’s life looking and acting like things had gotten _worse_ for you since graduation. Azula was going to have to get herself together, at least superficially. It was reassuring to have a goal in mind, something to work towards, even if the goal was “trick an ex you haven’t seen in several years into thinking you’re still a functioning member of society.”

*

Things did not go according to plan. That was quickly establishing itself as a theme in Azula’s new life.

A few days after her contentious manicure date, Azula found herself dissociating in the middle of a Chinese market on the edge of town proper. Uncle Iroh had sent her out to find some obscure ingredient he insisted that he needed for a new recipe; she suspected that he just wanted to get her out of the house for an hour, which was fine with Azula. She had already checked the supermarket and the shifty import store he frequented with no luck. That left her with this place, vaguely remembered from childhood trips with her mother. Azula was nothing if not dogged.

She was wearing leggings and an old sweatshirt emblazoned with her sorority’s Greek letters. She’d hoped that the stores would be mostly empty at this hour, or at the very least that nobody would recognize her sans makeup and with her hair tucked into her hood. She should have known that had been asking too much of the universe. When she rounded the corner on the spice aisle, there was Ty Lee, with her cart parked right in the middle of the goddamn aisle no less.

She looked up. Her face froze in an expression of disbelief, then relaxed into a tentative smile.

“Azula!” she exclaimed. “It’s been such a long time!”

Ty Lee had grown out her signature flippy bangs, but other than that, she looked exactly the same. Same long braid, same lean dancer’s muscle, same stupid yin-yang tattoo on her shoulder. Despite the fact that it was February, she was wearing a crop top and a pair of ancient harem pants, probably dating back to high school themselves. What was the joke they’d always repeated back and forth in the high school bathroom, rolling their uniform skirts before homeroom? _Hoes don’t get cold._ She pulled Azula in for a short, tight hug.

“How have you been?”

“Great,” Azula lied. “What about you?”

“I’m doing awesome!”

Just then, another woman came up the aisle toward them. She plunked a carton of mushrooms into the cart and wrapped an arm around Ty Lee’s waist.

“Who are—oh. Azula.” She seemed just as surprised as Ty Lee had been, though nowhere near as excited.

“You remember Suki, don’t you?”

Yes, _now_ she remembered Suki. The two of them had been frequent opponents in various high school sports. Azula distinctly recalled exchanging smack talk with her when they were supposed to be shaking hands before a game. Coming out of the closet had changed Suki’s aesthetic quite a bit; she had gone from looking like a mousy little nobody to looking like the captain of any amateur women’s rugby team.

“You two are…”

“Together,” Suki finished just a touch too forcefully. For someone who had always made such a show of being ultra-sensitive to auras and vibes, Ty Lee seemed awfully oblivious to her girlfriend’s open hostility.

“How long are you going to be in town?”

“I’m not sure. No more than a couple of weeks.” Another lie.

“We should catch up before you leave!” Ty Lee said, hopelessly genuine as ever, smiling that welcoming, open-faced smile. It was criminally easy to wipe that look right off her face. Azula had done it a thousand times, watched her face crumple, or sag, or just go smooth, resigned. It had made her feel powerful; perhaps more accurately, it had made her feel like she was in control of something, anything. She squashed the impulse.

“I would like that.”

“You should come to one of my classes,” Suki suggested. “Then we can all hang out after.”

Azula had to hand it to her: she was good. Scary, even. But if Azula let herself be intimidated by every sporty dyke who gave her a dirty look, she would miss out on a hell of a lot of sex with other people’s girlfriends, so she just smiled as agreeably as she could.

“That’s a great idea, babe!” Ty Lee exclaimed. “You’ll have so much fun, Azula. Suki is an amazing teacher. Is your number the same? I’ll text you the schedule right now.”

As soon as they had said their goodbyes and left her alone in the spice aisle, Azula hurried out of the store and across the parking lot to her uncle’s car. She leaned the seat all the way back and laid there for a minute, out of sight, her hands over her face. What the fuck was she doing? Masochistically revisiting every single one of her failures as a human being? Making amends like some common twelve-stepper? She had money, enough for the security deposit on a moderately shitty apartment somewhere. She had a pre-law degree. She could get a job as a clerk or a paralegal, work her way through law school. She could still have the life she had always envisioned for herself, but deep down, she knew that she didn’t want it anymore. Whether she’d been aware of it or not, her primary motivation had always been fear, and that made her fucking furious. She was better than that, smarter than that, worth more than that. Now it was a matter of deciding what she _did_ want. The door that led to her own desires and aspirations had been locked for a long time, and she didn’t know if she still had the key.

Azula was halfway home before she realized that she hadn’t even looked for the single item she had gone out to buy.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Azula attends a migraine-inducing dinner at Zuko and Mai's house and adds some more dirty laundry to her family's ever-growing pile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I ended up splitting what was supposed to be one long chapter into two shorter ones because it was getting insanely long and difficult to edit, so just know that this scene doesn't end here and continues into the next chapter.
> 
> I went back and forth about how many children I wanted to include in this fic, but I finally decided on one for the sole reason that I'm not responsible enough to care for more than one fictional child at a time.

Immediately upon entering Zuko and Mai’s ugly midcentury ranch, Azula was confronted with a framed photo of the wedding she had not attended.

Aesthetically speaking, it was a nice picture. The newlyweds were in profile, standing in a grassy summer field, smiling at one another. The photographer had tastefully chosen to capture the good half of Zuko’s face. Mai looked beautiful and ethereal in her lacy, long-sleeved dress, her slender arms wrapped around Zuko’s neck. If it had been a photo of two strangers, Azula never would have given it a second look, but she knew these people, and they were not the “smiling in a field” type. There was something about it that was just off enough to be unsettling. It looked like they were posing in Halloween costumes, staging what they thought a wedding photo was supposed to look like. Maybe that was what weddings were supposed to be for: manifesting not what you are, but what you wish you could be, what you hope you are going to become together.

It made Azula want to go back and wait in the car. 

Uncle Iroh had taken his shoes off by the door, but she left her smart leather mules on as she made her way into the living room. She had no desire to get comfortable. She had no desire to be there at all, really, but agreeing to this dinner had been a tactical move. The longer she stayed at her uncle’s place, the higher the likelihood she would run into Zuko. She much preferred to schedule that reunion on her own terms, if not on her own turf.

Uncle Iroh had disappeared into the house; she could hear him talking to someone, presumably Zuko, in the other room. Mai was wandering around the living room picking up baby toys and tossing them haphazardly into a basket. The house itself may have been hideous and tacky, but the interior looked exactly the way Azula had imagined a house decorated to Mai’s specifications would look: sterile, minimalist, functional, and dark. The jangly plastic toys and colorful plush animals looked hilariously out of place in contrast.

“Where’s my dear brother planning to hide all night?” Azula asked, lingering at the edge of the room with her arms crossed over her chest. She felt overdressed in her fitted slacks and no-nonsense blouse; Mai was wearing leggings, a baggy sweater, socks that were so large and ill-fitting that they must have been Zuko’s. 

“The kitchen,” Mai replied absently. She was clearly too preoccupied to take the bait. “He’s making dinner.” 

“Hell must be freezing over as we speak.” Azula found it difficult to imagine Zuko baking a cake from a box, let alone cooking an entire dinner.

Just then, Uncle Iroh came back into the room, bouncing the baby in his arms. He lifted one of her pudgy little arms and waved it at Azula, who did her best not to physically recoil. If there was one thing she hated, it was children. Maybe it was because she’d never gotten to be a child herself; maybe it was because children were loud, smelly, sticky, unreasonable little shits with zero redeeming qualities. 

“This is your Aunt Azula. Say hi, Izumi.”

Azula wasn’t sure if the command was for her or the child, but neither of them obliged. Izumi looked at her with big dark eyes, one finger stuck in her drooly mouth. Azula looked back, her lips pressed together tightly. Zuko’s genes were doing a lot of heavy lifting; she was the spitting image of Azula’s own baby pictures. For Izumi’s sake, she hoped the similarities remained purely physical.

Azula was saved from having to interact with her niece any further by a knock on the door. Uncle Iroh seemed surprised, but Azula immediately recognized it for what it was: a buffer. Zuko had always been a supreme coward. 

Mai picked up what appeared to be a long, colorful stuffed caterpillar, looked at it as if she had never seen it before in her life, and then went to answer the door with the stupid thing still in her hand. Azula perched on the couch and waited to see what unlucky person or persons Zuko had invited to put between him and any sort of confrontation. Her wan amusement, however, immediately turned to horror as soon as her fellow guests rounded the corner.

“Azula, you remember Katara and Aang.” Mai did not look particularly willing to reacquaint her with them if _didn’t_ remember, but of course she did. Azula had always hated the two of them for their shared brand of goody-two-shoes bullshit; the knowledge that they were still together and still blasting beams of G-rated sunshine out into the world made her hate them even more.

In high school, Katara had always given off big horse girl energy, but the intervening years had been kind to her. The thick, wavy hair that had once made her look like a frumpy dork now leant her a windswept, outdoorsy sort of beauty. Her body screamed, _“I go to hot yoga classes twice a week and I actually enjoy them!”_ She was balancing a casserole dish on her hip, smiling as if she were glad to see Azula, which she almost certainly was not. Of everyone in Zuko’s ragtag band of friends, she had borne the brunt of Azula’s casual, high-school-mean-girl cruelty most often. She had been a shamefully easy target: Army brat with a dead mom, deadbeat dad, desperate for everyone to like her, hair-trigger temper, quick to fight and quick to cry.

“Nice to see you again,” Azula said tightly.

“You too!” Katara exclaimed. She seemed a lot more confident in her herself; Azula tried not to let that make her mad.

After she hung her coat up, Katara carried her casserole dish off to the kitchen, presumably to help Zuko with dinner. Unfortunately, Aang sat down on the couch. Azula looked around the living room for help, but Mai had disappeared. Uncle Iroh was sitting on the carpet with Izumi, pushing a red firetruck around and making car noises. He’d finally found someone whose maturity level matched his own. 

“Long time no see,” Aang said in that obnoxious, overfamiliar way he’d always had. He had almost doubled in height; somehow, it made him look even more like a goofy idiot than he had before. He was still completely bald, but he had grown a chinstrap to rival any heavy metal bassist in the tri-state area. 

“Yes. The last time I saw you, you were five feet tall and rode around everywhere on a Razor scooter.”

He laughed. “Good to know people are carrying around such fond and meaningful memories of me.”

Azula echoed him with her patented fake party laugh, already halfway out of her seat.

“Excuse me.”

“Where are you going?” Uncle Iroh asked, eyeing her with a mixture of suspicion and concern.

“Bathroom,” she called over her shoulder. 

There weren’t enough rooms in the little house to warrant snooping around for too long, but Azula couldn’t resist giving herself the grand tour. She avoided the kitchen, where she could hear the easy cadence of Zuko and Katara’s conversation rising and falling underneath the sounds of cooking. There was Izumi’s bedroom, crib and rocking chair and all, papered with a nauseating balloon print. She checked the medicine cabinet in the bathroom; Mai was on a high enough dose of an antidepressant to tranquilize half the town, but that was hardly news. Baby aspirin, regular aspirin, allergy pills…boring.

Azula couldn’t quite bring herself to step into the master bedroom. It was even more Spartan than the rest of the house, superficially devoid of any significant decorations or personal effects. The only items indicating that anyone at all slept there were a novel, a small tangle of hair ties, and an abandoned glass of water on the night stand. It looked a lot like her parents’ bedroom had looked before her mother had left, she thought, and was hit with an unexpected wave of sadness. She imagined that the photo in the foyer had been bestowed with a sort of reverse-Dorian Gray curse, sucking up all the happiness and love and color in the house, growing more and more radiant while everyone inside got grayer, sadder, less lively every day.

She found Mai out on the back patio; she was standing at the very edge of the concrete square, smoking, almost invisible against the dark little copse of trees that divided their row of houses from the next row over. She didn’t turn around when Azula opened the sliding door and stepped out to join her.

“Why are you dressed like you’re here for a job interview?” she asked tonelessly.

“Why are _you_ dressed like a college freshman who just left a hookup at a frat house?”

They were toothless insults, a greeting of sorts. Mai offered her a cigarette from a crumpled pack. Azula didn’t smoke, but she had a lot of practice standing around and holding a lit cigarette. Smoke breaks and after-hours drinks decided matters of business more often than formal meetings did. It gave her something to focus on besides how cold it was out there without a coat, anyway.

The silence between them was almost companionable. Azula was just starting to relax a little when Mai spoke.

“He’s fucking her.”

Azula absorbed this information with a thoughtful hum, watching the cigarette smoke trail away into the suburban darkness. She wished she could say that she was surprised, but it was _exactly_ like Zuko to invite his mistress to dinner with his estranged sister. He’d always been hopelessly in love with his own melodrama. Once upon a time, having blackmail of this caliber to hold over his head would have delighted her, but she wasn’t playing the same games anymore. There was a small amount of satisfaction in the confirmation that Katara wasn’t as perfectly wholesome as she seemed, but Azula didn’t want it at Mai’s expense.

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing.”

Azula let the word hang in the air between them for a moment while she measured out her response carefully.

“In my humble opinion,” she began. “My brother has been let off the hook too often for his own good.”

“Look who’s talking.”

Azula rolled her eyes. “We’ve _both_ been let off the hook too often. Happy?”

Mai just shrugged. She looked as if she were trying to set the bare February trees on fire with her eyes.

“I might be wrong.”

Azula was no card-carrying feminist, but she firmly believed that a woman should always follow her instincts, even if everyone in her life second-guessed her. _Especially_ then. She shook her head.

“You’re smarter than that. You’re smarter than _him._ You always were.”

Mai dropped her eyes to the ground, shoulders jerking in another miserable shrug. Azula bumped the other woman lightly with her hip.

“Maybe _you_ should fuck _her_ husband.”

Azula thought she heard a laugh disguised in the puff of smoke Mai exhaled, thought she saw the ghost of a smile as it passed over her lips. She felt the same spark of triumph she used to feel on the rare occasions when she’d managed to make her most even-tempered friend angry.

“Gross.”

The silence that fell then was sympathetic, conspiratorial, even. If Ty Lee had been there, she would have told Mai that she didn’t deserve to be treated that way. She would have hugged her and promised her that she’d help her get through this. There was a reason Mai only ever told Azula her secrets. She wasn’t capable of hearing those platitudes any more than Azula was capable of saying them. That was why they’d been best friends for so long: they spoke the same stunted language, dancing elegantly around the subject, deftly steering one another away from the places it hurt too much to press.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the funniest ep of ATLA is the one where Katara canonically invents hot yoga and nothing can change my mind


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dinner goes about as well as can be expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your responses! I love hearing what people think about my work--it's inspiring and gets me excited to write.

Azula had attended a lot of unbearable dinners in her life—family, business, sorority—but this one felt like a targeted karmic punishment for past wrongdoings. Six adults and a baby in a highchair were clustered around a table meant for four people, tops, far too intimate a setting for a group of people who were barely tolerating one others’ existence. She had claimed a seat at the end of the table to give herself as much space as possible, but Uncle Iroh still kept jostling her with his elbow every time he moved. Azula hated that the food Zuko had put in front of her actually looked good. She hated that _Zuko_ actually looked good. He had let his hair grow long; it suited him in a kind of ironic, punk-rock dad way. He looked like he had been to a few of those hot yoga classes himself, and he smiled a lot more readily than she remembered; it was fucking annoying. A wicked headache was beginning to pulse right behind her eyes.

Uncle Iroh immediately made the crucial error of asking Katara what she did for work. A full fifteen minutes later, she was still rambling about Indigenous water rights. It occurred to Azula that Katara was nervous. She probably didn’t want to be at this soap opera of a dinner any more than Azula did. Judging by the way Aang was looking at her as she delved into an exhaustive point-by-point breakdown of the intersection of tribal law, environmental policy, and some equally boring third thing, he didn’t share Mai’s suspicions about his wife. Judging by the way Zuko was looking at her, Mai had ample reason to be suspicious.

Mai was trying to persuade Izumi to eat some carrots that she did _not_ want while Uncle Iroh occasionally broke from the water discourse to chime in with unsolicited parenting advice. It was one of the most frustrating things Azula had ever watched unfold in real time, but to her credit, Mai never lost her patience. Those hormones that stopped mothers from immediately throttling their babies must have been powerful.

Azula was only half-listening to the conversation; she didn’t realize that she’d been asked a question until the entire table went quiet. Everyone was looking at her, the silence growing more awkward by the second.

“Sorry,” she said, clearing her throat. “What was that?”

“I just asked what you’ve been up to recently,” Katara said. Her smile was starting to look a little forced. “Are you still in college?”

_We’re the same age, you stupid bitch._ Apparently Zuko had neglected to fill her in on the specifics of why, exactly, Azula was in town; to be fair, talking about his sister’s suicide attempt probably would have put a real damper on the mood.

“I graduated college two years ago.”

“Oh. Cool. What’s in the future?”

_I’m not going to move back here and marry my high school boyfriend like the rest of you, if that’s what you’re asking._

“Law school,” she said stiffly.

“Headed to dad’s alma mater?” Zuko asked.

Azula’s stomach flip-flopped, but she didn’t let her discomfort show on her face. She slipped into her familiar, well-practiced condescension like a fur coat. 

“Of course not. Dad’s alma mater is mid-tier. I’m only accepting Ivy League offers.”

“Man, that sounds stressful,” Aang said, making a face. “You couldn’t pay me to go back to school.”

“I’m still convinced that they gave you a degree just to make you leave,” Katara joked. They were doing their job beautifully, diffusing the tension and redirecting the conversation like a couple of pros. Azula decided to play along.

“What did you major in?” 

“Communications,” Aang replied with a wink, flashing finger guns at her. Katara rolled her eyes fondly; she was a better liar than Zuko, not that it took much to earn that distinction. 

Before Azula could formulate a suitably scathing reply, a blob of smashed carrot splatted right into the middle of the table. Everyone looked at Izumi, who smiled with exactly two visible teeth, clearly proud of her throw.

“Sorry,” Mai said, already reaching for a napkin.

“I got it!” Katara popped out of her seat with a nervous energy that bordered on mania. She wiped up the orange mush and went to toss her napkin in the trash. On her way back to her seat, she ruffled Izumi’s wispy black hair.

“Stop trying to start a food fight, missy!” she teased, slipping into a cutesy baby voice.

Azula’s eyebrows shot up before she could stop them. For a moment, she was certain that Mai was going to say something; she had frozen with her own napkin halfway to Izumi’s chin, eyes narrowing ever-so-slightly. Azula wasn’t sure which would be worse: watching her friend completely crumble and give in or watching her pick a _Real Housewives_ fight in front of everyone. After a beat, Mai shook it off and began to dab the copious amount of carrot goop off her daughter’s face. Azula decided that she would rather have seen the fight.

“She’s a troublemaker,” Uncle Iroh chuckled. “She reminds me so much of you at that age, Azula.”

Azula put her fork down abruptly and excused herself for the second time that night.

In the bathroom, she flipped the switch for the fan, turned on the tap, put the toilet seat up, and tried to gag as quietly as possible. This was the main reason she hadn’t eaten anything. She obviously hadn’t wanted to give Zuko the satisfaction of seeing her enjoy his cooking, but mostly, she hadn’t wanted to end up exactly where she was now: kneeling on the fuzzy blue bath mat, holding her own hair back while she dry-heaved.

Azula’s stomach had been fucked up for years. All her sorority sisters thought she was bulimic. She’d seen a doctor about it once, but after a few tests came back clear, he’d started tossing around words like “psychosomatic” and “triggers” and “therapy.” That had been the end of that. It became just another problem she learned to live with, a relatively minor entry on the long list of things she was concealing.

By the time she had finished spitting up stomach acid, Azula’s headache had progressed from “pounding” to “blinding.” She took four aspirin, did her best to fix her smeared lipstick, and rejoined the festivities.

They managed to get through the rest of the meal without anyone coming too close to expressing a genuine emotion. Katara offered to stick around to help clean up, but Zuko waved her off and promised to return her casserole dish later that week. After a lengthy gauntlet of well-wishes and goodbyes, Aang and Katara finally took their leave. Mai spirited Izumi away for a bath before bed, and Uncle Iroh gallantly volunteered Azula to help her brother with the dishes while he dozed off on the couch.

Zuko washed while she dried. Azula tried to think of something cutting to say about him not being able to afford a dishwasher, but her head hurt too much to muster enough venom. Zuko kept sneaking glances at her when he thought she wasn’t paying attention, as if looking at her dead-on would turn him to stone.

“What?” she finally snapped. 

“I’m sorry.” The words came out in a rush, as if he were expelling them before he could think better of it.

“For what?”

“For calling you out like that earlier. And…for everything, I guess. I’m your big brother, right? I should have been more mature when we were growing up. I never thought you needed me, but…maybe you did.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said sardonically. “I came back here because I had no choice, not because I wanted some Hallmark reunion where we tie up all our family’s loose ends. Don’t go through the motions on _my_ behalf.”

“I’m not,” he retorted, more calmly than she had expected. “Listen, I don’t really know what to say to you except that I don’t want things to go back to the way they’ve always been between us. I’m starting to deal with all the shit we went through when we were kids, and to be honest, it’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Maybe it was naïve of me, but I thought we might be able to help each other.”

“Everybody wants me to break down and cry and admit that my life has been _so_ unbearable that I just want to die…you all must really want to knock me down a peg.” She hated the way her own voice sounded—bitter and cynical and hurt.

“That’s not it, Azula.” He was starting to sound frustrated. “I wouldn’t think any less of you for crying or talking about the way you feel or whatever. Nobody would. That was one of the biggest lies Dad told us.”

This stung her in a way Zuko couldn’t have predicted. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about; she had kept the information from him on purpose. But that didn’t change the fact that Azula felt something akin to genuine grief when he talked about his relationship with their father. She knew that it had been violent and cruel, but it hadn’t been nearly as shameful as hers had been. He could talk about it—he had to. It was seared into the skin of his face. It was a terrible wound, but in the end, it was still a flesh wound. The parts of her that were still raw were invisible, deep inside, hard to reach and harder to describe.

“Bold of you to assume that I care what you think of me.”

Zuko sighed. “All I know is that the only thing that’s ever made me any feel better is talking about it.”

Azula couldn’t imagine that ripping herself open like that would have a particularly healing effect. She couldn’t imagine that _anything_ would heal her in any way that mattered, any way that lasted. Thankfully, Mai appeared in the doorway before the conversation could go downhill any further. She had changed into a pair of fuzzy pajama pants and a sweatshirt, apparently determined never to look good in clothes ever again.

“She won’t settle down until you say goodnight to her.”

It was the first time Azula had heard her address him directly all night. Zuko nodded without looking up; he dried his hands on a dishtowel and headed back to the bedroom. After a moment, she could hear him talking softly to Izumi. Mai rolled up her sleeves and took his place at the sink.

“I don’t know what he said, but he’s trying to tell you that he’s worried about you.”

“Please. Zuko was born full of shit.” Azula scowled at the plate she was drying. “He doesn’t care about me. He just feels guilty and he wants me to tell him that he’s not a shitty brother so he can sleep at night.”

“Are you okay?”

Azula realized then how fast her heart was beating. Her face felt hot, and her head felt ready to explode. If she were somebody else, maybe she would have cried, but tears were not in Azula’s repertoire of public reactions to strong emotion. She took all the feelings that Zuko had drudged up and burned them for fuel.

“I’m fine,” she said briskly, grabbing another dish. “But I do have a favor to ask of you.”

“No,” Mai said immediately. “No favors.”

“It’s nothing major. Just a fun, no-pressure fitness class. Incidentally, if you don’t come with me, there’s a non-zero chance that Suki will murder me.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing! I ran into the two of them at the market the other day. Ty Lee said she wanted to catch up, so Suki invited me to a class at the dojo. I assume she felt threatened.”

“I should just let her kill you,” Mai muttered. She paused for a moment, perhaps consulting an internal calendar, weighing her options, or calculating the most brutal way possible to tell Azula to go fuck herself.

“Fine,” she said at last, pulling the stopper to let the water out of the sink. “But I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for Ty Lee.”

Azula smiled to herself as she laid the dish towel neatly on the counter to dry. She tossed her words casually over her shoulder as she made her way to the living room to wake her uncle up.

“You can just admit that you want to be friends again. I won’t tell anyone.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Azula gets her first ever hobby, crosses over to the wrong side of the tracks, and has some stunningly inappropriate thoughts about her brother’s wife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gave me fits for some reason, but I think the end result was worth it. Hope you enjoy!

The Jasmine Dragon’s clientele was, in the most diplomatic terms possible, eclectic. There were community college kids with bags under their eyes frantically paging through textbooks at the old, heavy oaken furniture, new-age types in linen pants who were undoubtedly substituting tea, light work, and crystal therapy for health insurance, middle-aged women of all races and creeds who flocked on the small couches to gossip or to hold book clubs, and a large contingent of old Chinese men who gathered at all hours to play Go and talk shit in Mandarin. 

Uncle Iroh could have pulled in his fair share of the young professional crowd, but he completely and utterly refused to install Wi-Fi in the café. He was adamant that people should connect with one another while they drank his tea. Normally, this nauseatingly sentimental refusal to enter the 21st century would have pissed Azula off, but she didn’t have much use for Wi-Fi at the moment. She had deleted all her social media apps, and nobody from her old life had bothered to contact her since she had gone into the hospital. Not that she’d expected them to; she had made it very clear that every one of her relationships was transactional and disposable, to be continued or discontinued at her discretion. Honestly, it was kind of a relief. She didn’t have to keep as many stories straight.

She had claimed the table in the backmost corner of the shop, where she could keep an eye on the room without attracting too much attention to herself. Participating in the world in this small way made her feel less like a zombie, but she hated the feeling that everyone was staring at her, especially when she looked as unforgivably unkempt as she did right then. Her expensive athletic apparel was now a size too big on her, and the bun she had spent half an hour on looked less “effortless athleisure” and more “hungover at brunch.”

She was methodically working her way through all 656 pages of _History of the Peloponnesian War._ Azula hadn’t read a book for fun since elementary school, but Uncle Iroh had been insistent that she do something with her time other than sleep and stare sullenly out the window; reading was far preferable to, say, learning to crochet or cultivating a fucking windowsill herb garden. The old bastard had actually had the audacity to laugh at her when she’d plunked her stack of library books down on the kitchen table, a comprehensive selection of tomes on ancient warfare.

“When I said you might enjoy reading, I was imagining something a little lighter.”

“I don’t like fiction,” Azula had shot back defensively. He’d just laughed again and patted her arm. 

“You should read about what you are interested in, of course.”

She wouldn’t have admitted it to her uncle under pain of death, but it _did_ help. It felt good to wrap her mind around something other than the feedback loop of anxiety, self-loathing, grief, and anger that had taken up most of her free time recently. She had always been fascinated with history, especially the history of conflict. While the other girls in her high school had been working on projects about Susan B. Anthony or the history of the corset, she had been elbow deep in blood-soaked missives from long-silent battlefronts. Despite the rampant speculation of her many detractors, Azula did not enjoy the thought of widespread carnage and devastation; she wasn’t all that interested in anything that happened after the invention of the Gatling gun. Ancient war was rife with philosophical precepts, complex codes of honor, forgotten rules of engagement. She liked the idea of an orderly, moral war; she liked that oxymoron.

Azula had seen Mai come in, but that didn’t stop her from jumping when she tossed the diaper bag down beside her chair with a heavy _thud._ She stood over Azula with the baby on her hip, studying the cover of the book with a quizzical expression on her face. Izumi looked like a little marshmallow in her puffy winter coat; the visual would have been a lot cuter if her face hadn’t been visibly sticky.

“I didn’t think you liked to read,” Mai said accusingly. “You always used to make fun of me for being a nerd.”

“I never said I didn’t like to read; I just said you were a nerd. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

“I’d give a kidney to read something other than _Pat the Bunny._ ”

At the mention of _Pat the Bunny,_ Izumi patted her mother right in the middle of her face, then grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked. Incredibly, Mai did not even seem to register this indignity. She deftly disentangled her daughter’s fat little fingers from her hair and folded her hand in her own.

“She can’t talk yet. It’s not too late to drop her off on the steps of a church somewhere.”

The look she gave her could have struck a grown man dead, but Azula just smiled.

Mai handed off Izumi and all her accessories to Uncle Iroh, made him promise that he wouldn’t give her any sugar this time, and graciously accepted a cardboard to-go cup of tea that she clearly did not want. As soon as they got into her sensible black SUV, she rolled down the window and a lit a cigarette.

“Don’t tell Zuko that I smoke in the car,” she said, already typing the address Azula had sent her into her phone one-handed. “It’s a lease.”

“I’ll take it to the grave.” That was what happened when you married a high school bad boy, she supposed…one day he’s raging against the machine, the next he’s on your case about smoking in the car.

Mai pulled off of the quaint main street and into the busier, more commercial part of town. Azula watched the depressing sprawl of strip malls, big box chains, and office blocks creep past at the speed of early afternoon traffic.

“I thought after more than half a decade, things might have changed a little around here, but apparently not.”

“Still the most boring place to live in the continental United States,” Mai droned with obvious disdain. “I swear to god, they tore a Target down last week to put up a slightly bigger Target.”

“The big city’s only an hour and a half away. All the concrete, noise pollution, and traffic you can handle.”

“I don’t think I would like that much better.”

“I used to think I liked it, but I don’t know if that was because I actually did or because I really wanted to.”

It was probably the most revealing thing Azula had said to anyone the entire time she had been in town, and it came out of her mouth before she could think better of it. Mai didn’t answer. Azula thought maybe she had been too maudlin, even for the queen of maudlin. She glanced over, but the other woman was looking at the road, face unreadable.

*

The dojo shared a parking lot with a strip mall that was more than half vacant. Azula had expected the place to have a name, but the only sign on the building was a big poster in the window listing all the types of classes they offered in four different languages. The building itself was a little cracker box that could have just as easily been a payday loan business or a fast food joint. The whole scruffy, boarded-up neighborhood was a far cry from the highly polished world they had grown up in. After Mai turned the engine off, they both sat there in silence, unmoving, a couple of used-to-be rich girls out of their comfort zone.

“Are you sure you put in the right address?” Azula asked.

“I double-checked.”

“I feel like we’re going to get jumped on our way in there.”

“We’ll probably get carjacked if we sit out here too long.” Mai glanced over the expanse of the vacant, trash-strewn parking lot.

“Good point. Let’s go.”

Inside, the place looked a little more welcoming, with the faded but cheerful décor of a mid-90s Chinese buffet. There were cheap plastic trophies and medals displayed on every flat surface, and the walls were hung with photos of successful students, instructors mid-demonstration, and group shots of grinning classmates. The last class was finishing up; a cadre of comically serious little kids in gis were bowing to their teacher. Ty Lee was sitting behind the front desk, staring at an iPad with her mouth open and her eyes narrowed as if she were struggling to comprehend what she was seeing; Azula knew her well enough to know that was just her “reading” face. She looked up at the sound of the bell and broke into a grin. With a wordless squeal, she bounced around the desk and pulled Azula into a crushing hug.

“I’m so glad you could make it!” she said with that breathless earnestness that had always made Azula’s heart hurt. Ty Lee rounded on Mai and trapped her in the same fierce embrace.

“I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever!” she exclaimed. “Azula was always great at getting the three of us together.”

“You could say that, I guess.” Mai shot Azula a look that she did not quite know how to interpret.

“I have to sit up here and check people in.” Ty Lee stuck out her tongue and made a face like a kid who had been told to do her chores. “You can put your stuff over there. Suki will be out in a minute. See you after class!”

Ty Lee pointed them toward a corner containing a bench, a coat rack, and a stack of wooden cubbies. They dutifully shelved their belongings and hung their jackets up. Azula’s eyes were immediately drawn to her friend’s bare arms, pale and lightly freckled. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen Mai in a sleeveless shirt, and now she knew why. The scars looked old, faded to raised white lines and pink slashes, all neatly aligned with one another along her shoulder and the inside of her upper arm. She felt a strange desire to run her finger down them like spines on a bookcase, replay the self-hatred she had felt when she’d put the razor to her skin until she understood it as well as she understood her own. It was odd to think that were things she hadn’t known about Mai even when they had been at their closest. 

“What kind of class is this again?” Mai asked, breaking Azula away from her thoughts. She was looking toward the front desk, where Ty Lee was chatting with a gaggle of old women in appalling monochromatic sweat suits.

“I have no idea.” Azula had chosen based on the time slot without really reading the class description. All she knew that it was for adults and it wasn’t scheduled at the crack of dawn; getting out of bed was a lot harder than it used to be.

“ _Azula,_ ” Mai groaned. “Are you serious?”

Before she could pull out her phone to check, Suki appeared in front of them, looking butch as ever in a sports bra, a cutoff tank top, and a pair of joggers. Her smile only looked a little bloodthirsty.

“Hey, guys. Thanks for coming,” she said. “Not gonna lie, though—I was kind of surprised when you picked this class.”

“I let Mai decide,” Azula said, the lie rolling effortlessly off her tongue.

“Oh, okay. Well, it should be really chill. This is my last class of the day, so I figured we could all go to the bar around the corner afterward to hang out a little.”

“Sounds great.”

With a jaunty little salute, Suki made her way over to the mats that the children had been practicing on and began to pick them up in preparation for whatever they were about to do.

“I’m going to get you for that,” Mai muttered, digging a sharp elbow into Azula’s ribs. 

“Looking forward to it,” she sing-songed back.

*

Suki put Azula, Mai, a handful of mismatched thirty-somethings, and what seemed like an entire senior center through a series of gentle warm-ups and some basic taiji forms. It had been a long time since Azula had done anything but mindlessly sweat at the machines in an LA Fitness, impersonal enough work to ignore the disconcerting feeling that she didn’t quite fit in her own body. She had spent so much of her life distancing herself from it, from the things that happened to it, from its pain and discomfort and its desires, too. It felt like an abandoned crime scene, a place that was inherently violent and tragic no matter what she did to change it superficially. On some level, she felt like it didn’t really belong to her; it was on loan, and she had to be ready to vacate the premises at a moment’s notice.

Suki kept insisting that this practice was supposed to be meditative, but half an hour in, Azula felt more ready to walk into traffic than to make peace with her inner child. There was nothing physically strenuous about it, but she still felt hot, irritable, and uncomfortable. She hoped that maybe it was over when Suki brought them all back to standing, but that would have been too good to be true. The class was just entering its second phase.

“We’re going to go through a couple of push hands techniques,” Suki announced. “Grab a friend or make a new one.”

She pulled one of the old women up the to front to help her demonstrate. They stood an arm’s length apart, then stepped one leg forward and extended their arms. Suki broke down each of a series of movements that when passed back and forth between two people would make a sort of flowing circular motion.

Mai turned to look at her, raising her eyebrows as if to ask, _are we actually going to do this?_ Azula just shrugged, squared her hips, and held her arms out. Some of their classmates were doing more cackling and gossiping than hand-pushing, but the two of them made short work of the exercise. As with most things between them, they didn’t have to talk about it to come to an understanding. 

When she was confident that she could keep repeating the motion without looking at her own hands, Azula watched the subtle expression of concentration on Mai’s face instead. For someone who regularly made such theatrical shows of disinterest, she had always approached everything with a quiet, immovable determination. Sometimes it was impossible to know what she wanted until she already had it. She and Azula complemented one another in much the same way that electrical currents needed to be routed to the ground so they didn’t burn up everything they touched.

The other woman’s eyes ticked up to meet hers, and Azula felt a sudden jolt in her stomach. Mai spent so much time looking anywhere but at other people’s faces that it was easy to forget the distinctive mahogany shade of her eyes. Azula was suddenly hyperaware of Mai’s cool palm brushing over her skin as she turned her forearm over; when it was her turn to repeat the move, Azula watched a wave of goosebumps chase her hand over along the other woman’s willowy arm.

One summer night when they had been about thirteen, Azula, Ty Lee, and Mai had taken turns practicing kissing in the privacy of Mai’s parents’ basement. Azula still remembered the feeling: a hungry tingling followed by the overwhelming relief that she was capable of feeling the way that other girls seemed to feel when they got close to a boy. All the agony and confusion and self-flagellation had come later; that night, she had been blissfully happy that she wasn’t totally broken. Ty Lee had admitted to having a similar revelation years later, once the two of them had gone far beyond practicing. She had assumed that Mai _had_ just been perfecting her form for the boys who would come later, academically applying herself to the mechanics of a kiss without feeling any of the sparks, but it occurred to Azula just then that she had never actually asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLxyJuOv7CA
> 
> This was my reference vid for push hands since I know I did the worst job of explaining what it's supposed to look like. One of my profs once made us do this with each other for a full ten minutes (pre-COVID obvs) and I still haven't recovered from how awkward it was.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on Twitter @prettyalouettey and tell me it's all going to be okay


End file.
